Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation

Millennials are the "ME ME ME GENERATION," writes Joel Stein for Time magazine's new cover story out today — which makes him only the latest culture writer in the last century or so to declare the youth self-obsessed little monsters.

Millennials are the "ME ME ME GENERATION," writes Joel Stein for the cover of Time magazine, which is apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who were the plain old "Me Generation" (one me, no caps) and who created the "Me Decade" in the 1970s, and who coined the phrase, "But enough about me… what do you think about me?" in the 1980s when they were raising the next narcissists, Generation X. Sometimes you get the sense that these magazines' cultural writers have very little experience with the entire American culture, and prefer to make their grand analyses based on what people they know in the gentrified parts of cities like New York and Los Angeles were talking about at brunch last weekend. The type of young person that magazine writers come across most frequently are magazine interns. Because the media industry is high-status, but, at least early on, very low pay in a very expensive city, it attracts a lot of rich kids. Entitled, arrogant, spoiled, preening — those are the alleged signature traits of Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers. Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you.

To Stein's credit, he has some sociological research to make his case — he brings "the cold, hard data." However, much of his data can be countered by other data. For example, Stein writes:

Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80 percent of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60 percent did.

Yes, people are marrying later and the economy sucks. The unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, a full point lower, if Washington — you might know them as "old people" — hadn't implemented spending cuts in 2011, The New York Times reports. As for laziness, the chart at right shows that as worker productivity has soared, wages have remained stagnant. We're all working hard, we're just not getting paid.

But here is Stein's most important bit of data:

The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58 percent more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.

About that. There is another paper over at NIH.gov that argues that that is kind of maybe completely wrong. In a 2010 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science and titled "It Is Developmental Me, Not Generation Me," Brent W. Roberts. Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva write:

First, we show that when new data on narcissism are folded into preexisting meta-analytic data, there is no increase in narcissism in college students over the last few decades. Second, we show, in contrast, that age changes in narcissism are both replicable and comparatively large in comparison to generational changes in narcissism.

Basically, it's not that people born after 1980 are narcissists, it's that young people are narcissists, and they get over themselves as they get older. It's like doing a study of toddlers and declaring those born since 2010 are Generation Sociopath: Kids These Days Will Pull Your Hair, Pee On Walls, Throw Full Bowls of Cereal Without Even Thinking of the Consequences. Further, they write:

In turn, when older people are told that younger people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they may be prone to agree because they confuse the claim for generational change with the fact that younger people are simply more narcissistic than they are. The confusion leads to an increased likelihood that older individuals will agree with the Generation Me argument despite its lack of empirical support.

Hahaha, you doddering old confused fools! Generation Abe Simpson!

For some visual evidence of this phenomenon, here is a century or so of culture writers declaring the youth to be self-obsessed little monsters.

The Atlantic, September 1907: In the cover story, "Why American Marriages Fail," Anna A. Rogers warned, "The rock upon which most of the flower-bedecked marriage barges go to pieces is the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of the Self."

Life, May 17, 1968: "The Generation Gap." An uncle and his 20-year-old nephew detail their experiences living together one summer. It goes how you'd expect, except that Uncle Ernie tried weed for the first time. Like, one time, Ernie met his nephew's friends at a diner:

Then somebody said, "Would you take the Dow account?"

"You bet," I said.

"Even though they make napalm?" he asked. ...

Even as I said it I knew the phrase to make a living could have absolutely no meaning to these children of the affluent society.

New York, August 23, 1976: "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening." Tom Wolfe opened this story with a sobering account of some kind of Los Angeles thing in which a couple hundred people got together and pressed "the reset button" on something that really bothered them, and for one lady, that thing was hemorrhoids. "In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970s, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade."

New York Times, October 17, 1976: "'76 Politics Fail to Disturb Campus Calm and Cynicism." The youth were too busy navel gazing to care about politics. "The Now Generation has become the Me Generation," the Times said. A photo of a napping youth read, "A student at UCLA was more interested in an afternoon nap last week than a speech by Gary Familian, a Democratic House candidate."

The Washington Monthly, February 1980: Greg Easterbrook wrote about how young people were having trouble coupling in "Fear of Success" (subhed: "If you want me, she said, I’ll be hiding under the bed"). And while he said we can't blame everything on self-obsession, he did acknowledge a major social trend. "It is tempting to see willing disappointment in romance as a symptom of self-obsession: since no lover can rival in grandeur the upper-case Self, what is to be gained from giving one's affection? But me-mania is a fashion, not a level of spirit." This was plugged on the cover as "THE NOT-ME GENERATION."

Newsweek, December 30, 1985: "The Video Generation." There they are, those preening narcissists who have to document every banal moment with their cutting-edge communications technology.

Time, July 16, 1990: Cover: "Twentysomething." Inside: "Proceeding With Caution." Yes, like every generation, Gen X was a bunch of screwups: "They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder… They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial… They postpone marriage because they dread divorce." However, in 1990, Time ranked them as not as terrible as their parents on at least one score: "By and large, the 18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values of the baby boomers, viewing that group as self-centered, fickle and impractical." That scorn does not lead to being much different. "Like Madonna in her hit song 'Vogue,' this generation knows how to 'strike a pose.'"

Swing, September 1996: "Generational Warfare." Look out old man, there's a well-groomed nihilist in his sexual prime coming your way.

Time, August 6, 2007: "It's All About Me." China's "twentysomethings" had boldly gone where every other generation had gone before.

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.

“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”

Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the countryhas deep historic roots and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.